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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/07/91 -- Vol. 9, No. 49
MEETINGS UPCOMING:
Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are on Wednesdays at noon.
LZ meetings are in LZ 2R-158. MT meetings are in the cafeteria.
_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C
06/26 LZ: ALTERNATE WORLDS by Robert Adams ("What If Things Were Different?")
_D_A_T_E _E_X_T_E_R_N_A_L _M_E_E_T_I_N_G_S/_C_O_N_V_E_N_T_I_O_N_S/_E_T_C.
06/08 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: TBA
(phone 201-933-2724 for details) (Saturday)
06/15 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA
(phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)
HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 834-1563 hocpa!jetzt
LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell LZ 1B-306 576-6106 mtuxo!jrrt
MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
HO Librarian: Tim Schroeder HO 3B-301 949-4488 hotsc!tps
LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 576-3346 mtunq!lfl
MT Librarian: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 957-2070 mtgzy!ecl
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
1. I'll tell ya, folks--it is all starting to happen. Maybe too
fast it is all starting to happen. I mean, technology had been
transforming the world already, but it is starting to take some
pretty surrealistic turns. I mean, though, this one ... if I read
it in a novel I would say "weird idea but hard to buy." But I
didn't read it in a novel; I read it in _W_o_r_l_d _P_r_e_s_s _R_e_v_i_e_w. This
story actually appeared in _N_e_u_e _Z_e_i_t, published in Berlin. It
seems that the new Germany has a problem that was pushed on it by
the old East Germany. East Germany made this car. It was called
the Trabant. On the road it had all the appeal of a used paper
diaper. It was ugly, it was a super-polluter, it was plastic. It
was cheaper to make the body out of plastic than out of metal. A
lot more people can afford to have a car if it is made out of
plastic, you see. They might have been able to achieve the goal of
everyone having a car if they had just made one that you drove by
running your feet on the ground like the Flintstones' car.
THE MT VOID Page 2
Anyway, so they made these "smoke-spewing," plastic cars and it is
sort of a runabout. That means it ran about the distance from East
Germany to West Germany. And that was about it. Now these things
are being found abandoned all over western Germany (well, I guess
you could call it western Germany; West Germany is no more but it
is the part of Germany that used to be West Germany). So anyway,
these things are being abandoned all over. And the government has
to figure out what to do with them. Now when you find one of our
cars abandoned, at least there is someone who wants it. The body
is made out of metal that is worth money. You can recycle the
metal from the body of one of our cars. If you make a car out of
plastic nobody wants it when it dies. It's like bottles made out
of plastic. In non-troglodyte states that have a deposit on soda
bottles, there is an intrinsic value on the empties and they go
someplace rather than being left on the roads. There is someone
willing to buy back what is left over. But cars and bottles made
out of plastic with little intrinsic worth just end up decorating
the scenery.
So what the government wants to do is burn the abandoned Trabants.
Except when you burn them they give off toxic gas. I mean, this
car is a real prize. This thing makes the Yugo look like a
Porsche. So what are they doing? Are you ready for this? They
have bred a special bacteria that eats Trabants! These little
beauties like nothing better than eating a tasty, succulent,
plastic car. Take a hundred pounds of this plastic and they can
eat it down to only two pounds of stuff that even bacteria can't
stomach. I don't know what they do with those two pounds. Maybe
they can breed another bacterium to tell the first one it is
leaving the best part uneaten.
And what a great precedent this sets. You got something you don't
want, you just breed some creature that eats it. How about a
gourmet of a bacterium that eats the pins out of new shirts and
also is fond of the pink scum that New Jersey water seems to leave
behind? What are the chances we could get a bacterium that eats
washing machine lint?
Now my question would be: what does a Trabantivorous bacterium have
for dessert when there are no more Trabants?
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 957-5619
...mtgzy!leeper
People sometimes forget that the oldest profession in
the world is ... journalism: the snake in the Garden
of Eden carried accurate information about the Tree of
Knowledge, and in spite of the appearance of being a
down-to-earth kind of guy, is still considered poisonous."
-- Samuel Hauser, Journalist, 1968